The free Theme Creator tool from Sony, allows designers to easily create themes for Xperia™ devices. The latest version, Theme Creator 1.0.0 BETA comes with enhancements that include a simplified UI, clearer navigation and over 500 editable graphical resources. There’s also new tutorial videos to help you get started.

We’re excited to let you know about our upcoming public SDK, allowing the creation of AR effects for use with Sony’s own AR effect app on Xperia devices. The SDK should be available by the end of this month.

Developer World recently caught up with Martin Fodor, a founding member of AndroPixel Studios (APS), to discuss the beginnings of the company, what success means to them, and their methods for creation and promotion of Xperia themes. Check out the interview below.

Could you benefit from knowing your Lifelog users favourite locations and predicting their movement between those locations? In this post, Sony’s Master Engineer, Håkan Jonsson, explains how to apply machine learning to location data retrieved from the Sony Lifelog API. Find out about machine learning, clustering, how to access Sony’s Lifelog API and check out Håkan’s own notebook.

If This Then That, or IFTTT, is a web-based service that offers users the ability to automate digital activities by connecting services and apps. Working together with Sony, IFTTT have integrated the Lifelog API, enabling the use of data capture and API endpoints from Sony’s activity tracker, giving users even greater creative control.

Update – In response to queries regarding the technicalities of the post, we’d like to clarify what we’ve released here. We provided build instructions based on the AOSP project under the branch android-m-preview, showing the Android M platform changes so far. That build gives an early preview of Android M for custom ROM developers to play with. Be aware that at this point the API levels are still at Lollipop MR1, what we show is Android M Developer Preview purely from a platform perspective.

Note that the Android M Developer Preview for Nexus devices from Google supports the latest API level. Xperia devices flashed using the build instructions linked from this post, do not support those APIs.